This sort of duality, what the physicist Didier Sornette calls “the fight between order and disorder,”99 is common in complex systems, which are those governed by the interaction of many separate individual parts.

The idea that something going up will continue to go up couldn’t be any more instinctive. It just happens to be completely wrong when it comes to the stock market.

The arrows are exactly the same length. But in one case, the ends of the arrows outward, seem to signify expansion and boundless potential. In the other case, they point inward, making them seem self-contained and limited. The first case is analogous to how investors see the stock market when returns have been increasing; the second case is how

As John Maynard Keynes said, “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”

When we play poker, we control our decision-making process but not how the cards come down. If you correctly detect an opponent’s bluff, but he gets a lucky card and wins the hand anyway, you should be pleased rather than angry, because you played the hand as well as you could. The irony is that by being less focused on your results, you may

If you talk with the very best players, they don’t take any of their success for granted; they focus as much as they can on self-improvement. “Anyone who thinks they’ve gotten good enough, good enough that they’ve solved poker, they’re getting ready for a big downswing,” Dwan told me.

Play well and win; play well and lose; play badly and lose; play badly and win: every poker player has experienced each of these conditions so many times over that they know there is a difference between process and results.

We can account for our neighbors’ success by the size of their home, but we don’t know as much about the hurdles they had to overcome to get there.

As an empirical matter, however, success is determined by some combination of hard work, natural talent, and a person’s opportunities and environment—in other words, some combination of noise and signal.